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No wonder Google Buzz has created so many mixed reaction. Besides being one of the — if not the most — coolest and elegant social media service to date, it’s a good example of a non intrusive design. Integration with Gmail is one huge selling point to begin with. Connecting with a handful of other [...]

OpenNebula is a platform providing the ability to manage a pool of virtual resources. You can create virtual machines and configure them as you would configure a physical machine connected your network. Difference between OpenNebula and Amazon EC2 (and other public cloud providers) is that Amazon EC2 is a public service. Amazon is having an [...]

Reading about philosophy can be confusing at times. Every time I try to read some deep philosophical thing my mind ends up being confused and tangled in a complex mess of thoughts that I completely forget what was I reading in the first place. Need for deliberate practice aside, now you know when someone [...]

Stonehenge is an Apache project started to demonstrate interoperability between different Web services platforms. Until we get this into the Stonehenge documentation, this is to record how to configure .Net trader client (a web interface written in .Net and is operating in the presentation layer) to talk to business service written using Java and is [...]

Yahoo has donated the caching proxy server they use internally to Apache Foundation. This, apart from acting as a high performance proxy server has many other cool features. If you’re trying it out here’s the minimum required settings that you should set in order it to act as a caching proxy server.
First you have to [...]

This article explains some worthy insights into making lead generation pages. An interesting idea that’s new to me was to make the page a dead-end. Having no links on the lead generation page that links back to the main site. Making it “harder” for the user to click something and navigate away from the lead [...]

No matter how many browsers are out there I still haven’t found the one true browser that rule ‘em all. This has the awkward situation where there has to be multiple browser instances running at any given time. All the memory that these fellows eats up is not much of a bigger deal because memory [...]

This is not about Bill Gates’ move into social media, twitter, the micro blogging craze for the cool kids. No. Nor this is about The Gates Notes where he write about his thoughts. After reading The Internet Tidal Wave [PDF] again, it’s fascinating to take a peek at Bill Gates vision for the company, 15 [...]

It’s been a few weeks that I’ve completely stopped using social media services Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think I’m missing that much. Well, may be a few tea time laughs and giggles, a few emails/IMs/a face-to-face chat that’s about not being able to understand tweets I can recall a very few birthdays [...]

Pointing WSO2 Identity Server to use user data stored in an external database has never been this easy. Once you complete the following it just works without having to do any other configuration or editing config files. All this can be done in few seconds using the excellent, intuitive web based management interface. In this [...]

SQL Azure is a wonderful service running the database in the cloud. This post summarizes the gotchas that you might wanna lookout for when trying to connect your PHP applications to talk to SQL Azure.

The default driver php_mssql.dll doesn’t work with SQL Azure. The Internets say that support for php_mssql is dropped from PHP 5.3. [...]

Going digital from an analog era feels nice. Everything is simpler. No more extended hours being trapped in a pitch black room with a red light. Purists aside, given sufficient space and the one thing everyone in this world doesn’t have, time, you can build up a collection of moments that are too good to [...]

Once in a while a band comes along with music that stick into you like a virus without a vaccine. It just wraps you in ways that’s inexplicable in words. Words, being words will not do enough justice to make you feel the same way as one would forget about everything else and just absorb [...]

… or is it? After seeing the official announcement I was kinda interested in trying it out. But Prabath beat me to it. With ubiquitous Internet access, making something like this can be advantageous to some. Everything being a web app is great if all of them work. Hulu for example, with its geo IP [...]

Apache Asia Roadshow 2009 will be happening from 3rd to 5th December this year. It’s scheduled with two days conference and one day unconference. It’s packed with a great set of talks and um .. yours truly will be talking on the 3rd about Web services interoperability demoing the Apache Stonehenge project. Do drop by [...]

Windows Azure is another cloud platform that can be used to deploy applications to the cloud and not worry about rest of the duct tape that’s required for smoother operation. Like many things from Microsoft, a killer feature is tight integration with Visual Studio. You can literally build and deploy applications to the cloud with [...]

If you’ve not already heard the term (gasp!) or don’t have an idea about cloud computing you can look no further than the excellent, short presentation titled “Cloud Computing – Why IT matters” by Simon Wardley. Also, read a great paper about the subject “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” [PDF].
Usually in [...]

Lack of a coherent essay these days can partly be blamed to the rise of the tablogging. Then again, striking a balance between a tech, utterly abstract mumbo jumbo or something explicit as a Tucker Max story is challenging There’s no better way to start a Monday morning with a hilarious rant about [...]

I’ve already installed Erlang using yum in Fedora 10. I wanted to install Erlsom and it’s available through CEAN. Steps for installing CEAN is explained nicely in the FAQ. Content of my VERSION file,

CEAN Erlang/OTP R12B erts-5.6.5 linux-x86 devel

You can find the version of Erlang installed with yum info erlang. erts version can be found [...]

SOA Governance by Todd Biske is surprisingly an easy read that explain what is governance and what does it mean in an SOA setting. It begins with a comprehensive introduction to governance and the three main important aspects, people, policies and processes. Then, he explains how to introduce SOA into existing project governance efforts. After [...]

Recently I built WSO2 Carbon. Here’s how I did it with some help from the carbon mailing list Do stick to the same build order. I did this on an Ubuntu machine. If you happen to see maven complaining about running out of memory just do,

$ export MAVEN_OPTS=”-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m”

First step, build Axis2 1.4.1 from [...]

I’ve been rewriting the Perl StockTrader client using Catalyst for the past week or so. The first version of the client was done using (gasp!) Perl/CGI. So it was about time to do it right. Thanks to the excellent documentation Catalyst provide, it was a straightforward task.
The main annoyance I faced was the lack of [...]

Last time I looked at Catalyst for a project, the time was really tight and had to do it by other means. This time however, I had slightly more time available so I started from Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial and boy, the docs are amazingly well written. Kennedy Clark has done
Catalyst is a MVC framework written in [...]

If you’ve read the architectural notes about RESTful applications and want to get your hands dirty writing one quickly, RESTful PHP Web Services by Samisa Abeysinghe is a book you should read. It starts with an introduction to what REST is and surrounding technologies. Since many web applications today expose their functions as RESTful APIs, [...]

Samisa has written a great blog post about making sensible choices in a bad economic situation. Specially making the right choices when it comes to your middleware.
For the uninitiated it might feel that choosing a low cost middleware platform is like choosing low cost, small, fuel efficient car. Anyone having driven a cheap small car [...]

Half cups of bubbles flocking together to make it seem as they like to be close to each other so badly. Every bystanding observer will tell without a second thought that it’s just gravity pulling them so hard. Like they have a choice. Glancing through the see through walls, holding onto each other. I tried [...]

While reading an article the other day, I just started googling some random phrases off of it and was stunned with the results. I could find the entire phrases in another source and that was not even mentioned in the article I was reading. A brief search for plagiarism will reveal that it’s such a [...]

By now I’m sure most of you have read more than a dozen articles about possibilities for open source products in the current economic crisis. Even for a fairly large enterprise the annual licensing fee for products that their using can be a big burden. Charging an annual licensing fee can be understandable from the [...]

Alan has nicely put into words something I’ve been pondering for a couple of days now. GitHub is a place where forking a codebase is the norm. You fork a particular codebase, play around with it, add your modifications and if the master branch owner agrees and think your stuff is cool he can merge [...]

I’ve been reading quite a few articles about the recent economic crisis and kept seeing compete.com cited as the source for some of the graphs. The tag line in compete.com’s website is all you need to read to know what kind of a service they provide, “Track your rivals. Then eat their lunch.”. Types of [...]

Pulseaudio multicasting options are a very evil thing to enable inside a network. If I can remember the numbers correctly it was sending out around 250 MB of UDP packets every hour when you enable it. This makes the whole network unusable.

Please don’t try this at office.

Lately, comment spam has been a big problem and I was sick of clearing around 15 - 20 or so spam comments that wordpress catches. Some of them escapes and was getting published. I knew about Akismet but the problem with that is you have to get an account on wordpress.com and give the API [...]

LyricWiki is an excellent free service providing song lyrics. A la wikipedia for song lyrics. One cool feature is that the site uses nuSOAP to provide a web services interface for fetching lyrics. Wrote a small PHP class with the help of WSF/PHP which will give a simpler interface. Grab it here (make sure to [...]

I’ve been using a Nokia N78 for couple of days now and it feels great. The biggest barrier in the very first couple of days was the lack of touch screen. I’ve been touching the icons and wondering why nothing happened, almost restarted the phone This will be like a mini review about the [...]

… the good. Surprise! IMHO, one of the best and stable products Microsoft has put out is Windows Mobile. 6.0 to be more specific because that’s what I use. I’ve been using an HTC Touch for more than a year and (surprisingly?) haven’t had a single problem with the phone or the Windows Mobile 6.0 [...]

I started my first blog in February 2004, it was called gnulog.blogspot.com and I quickly got addicted to writing. The problem with words is that the reader can interpret things you say in billion different ways. This also vary according to the mood the reader, in that particular moment. Many months later, when the blog [...]

Samisa has written a nice post about using PHP in the enterprise. A commenter there argues that he don’t use PHP because it’s a dynamically typed language. It’s somewhat true that if you’re coming from a statically typed language background you’re stormed with so many questions and wonder possible nightmares of using one. Once you [...]

The LBR-LBO CIO forum was an insightful event where it was discussed how local enterprises should think about disaster recovery and business continuity. The forum was moderated by Peter D’Almeda and there were some very interesting thoughts from the panellists as well as the audience.
Peter was interested in knowing why most corporations block services like [...]

So, yeah, google browser. For me the most compelling UI change is the tabs on top of addressbar. Had some tabs open and after switching between each other I’m feeling almost tired of the way it’s in Firefox/Opera/IE. That’s brilliance. The other brilliant idea is processes. It’s one of those simple things which make you [...]

From time to time, if you feel the need to piss someone off for their own good, let me assure you that it’s a perfectly natural thing. If you see someone living their lives without getting pissed off even for few minutes, do them a favour by pissing them off, at least once. Just like [...]